“When Apple’s Steve Jobs introduced the Apple Power Mac G5 this summer as the fastest personal computer any company had built to date, we took it with a grain of salt. After all, Apple had made that boast in the past, and those claims did not tend to hold up when independent third parties (such as ourselves) ran tests on current, real-world applications (not the synthetic benchmark tests Apple cited),” Troy Dreier reports for PC Magazine.
“Well, we’ll take that salt with a side of fries. After testing a loaded ($4,349 direct, after we opted for more RAM and upgraded graphics) dual 2.0-GHz Power Mac G5 on a range of high-end content creation applications and comparing the results with a similarly configured (and priced) Dell Precision 650 Workstation running dual 3.2-GHz Xeon processors, we see that indeed the G5 is generally as fast as the best Intel-based workstations currently available,” Dreier reports.
“Unfortunately, the G5 also ships with the standard unremarkable keyboard and one-button mouse, which look and feel more out of date with each main system update,” Dreier opines.
“Apple has succeeded in boosting its Power Mac line, taking Apple users into high-performance computing. And by outperforming top-specked Windows machines on some tests, Apple has proved that megahertz isn’t everything. The new flagship Mac will more than satisfy power-hungry graphics, video, and business users and may even win Apple some users from the Windows/Intel camp,” Dreier writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: PC Mag had to resort to comparing the Power Mac G5 to a workstation class Dell with twin Xeon processors. No Pentium need apply. As usual, they forget to mention the benefits of Mac OS X vs. Windows. For some unknown reason, they give the Power Mac G5 just 4 stars out of 5. Wonder why?